Tracking Tsarnaev: Facial Recognition Will ID the Next Bomber

Although video of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects spread across the world after the attack (and inspired some perhaps ill-advised Internet detective efforts), the FBI relied on old-fashioned methods to ID them. But new algorithms could make it possible for law enforcement to pick out likely suspects from even grainy footage or pictures.

Tracking Tsarnaev: Facial Recognition Will ID the Next Bomber

Tracking Tsarnaev: Facial Recognition Will ID the Next Bomber

Despite video footage and smartphone shots of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the FBI still had to resort to the old-fashioned "do you know this person?" technique to identify the men. Modern facial-recognition software alone can't process fuzzy images, but when Marios Savvides, head of Carnegie Mellon's CyLab, applied his super-resolution algorithm to an image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (not for the FBI investigation), the rendering was the 56th best match out of 50,000 faces. Savvides expects a fuller version of the software to be available within three years.

IMAGE 1 (SURVEILLANCE)

IMAGE 1 (SURVEILLANCE)

After collecting photos taken by witnesses and scouring footage from nearby closed-circuit TV cameras, FBI officials posted this image, among others, in an attempt to get the public to help identify the suspects. But all of the first images were too low-quality, with too little digital visual data, for facial-recognition software to process. Facial recognition requires at least 60 to 70 pixels between the eyes; most of the images only had from 12 to 20.